A novel with a Spotify playlist and song-title chapter headings – that gets me. So does a book about the turn-of-the-millennium college scene, long enough ago to seem quaint and yet still deceptively vivid. (Don’t we always cling to the songs we loved when we were nineteen?) Holly Brickley’s Deep Cuts feels like an extended cut album in its musical meta-analysis and its 20-something characters searching for a way out of mundanity.
Percy meets Joe in a bar one night in Berkeley in 2000, finds out he has a girlfriend, and becomes his musical muse. More than an inspiration, actually–she improves his lyrics and his melodies, especially in the liminal bridges–and harnesses songwriting potential of her own, which she channels into a column for a zine edited by Joe’s girlfriend. Through more ups and downs than San Francisco’s streets, Percy and Joe lose and find each other on rooftops, in bars, and in their memories, while Joe rides a red-hot rock career and Percy spots trendsetters for a living and sharpens her voice in print and song.
The novel evokes nostalgia for the college experience you had or wish you’d had. After describing the city’s “undisturbed, unkempt” Craftsman houses, Percy remembers that “Berkeley felt like a glitch in the modern machine, back then, an alternate universe for the chosen few. Maybe this is how everyone feels about their college towns.” In flashbacks to my own East Coast college town, music seems to be rising from the pavement. It’s fall, the weather turning drafty, and I’m wearing a tiara while Madonna’s Immaculate Collection plays at a Halloween party in fin de siècle dorm rooms. Or it’s summer, Ace of Base and Green Day sweating off the buildings with their beats after we’ve closed out a midnight press run of the college paper.
Amid similar humidity, when Percy moves to Manhattan for graduate school, she finds romance with someone who is not Joe: “The summer of 2003 in New York was dripping-wet hot, I guess like always, though I swear people said it was especially bad that year. I was waitressing and trying to write, when I wasn’t camping out for Shakespeare in the Park tickets or sitting at outdoor tables of restaurants drinking well margaritas with Raj.” I never lived in New York or spent a summer there, though I wish I had. Throughout Deep Cuts, I felt as though I was spending my days with Percy, writing lyrics with her, sucking on ice cubes at an outdoor table, pining for a creative life.
This book may seem like a light read, as you grab your own margarita (why not?) and listen to the Slants or Kate Bush. But it seeps into you as powerful music does, with a clutch of a melody, a few notes that open you up.
Toward the end of the novel, when Percy and Joe find each other somewhat older and maybe wiser, Percy remembers a comment “about music infiltrating our physical lives” and asks “if that phenomenon worked both ways – if good music came straight from the body, sometimes. If the best stuff happened when you kept the borders between your mind and body as open and porous as humanly possible.” This book will keep those borders open to nostalgia, creativity, and the person you once were.